The Hindu Business Line : Military spending

THE demise of the Soviet Union raised hopes of a "peace dividend" of enormous proportions, previously spent on waging the Cold War and creating and maintaining nuclear and conventional arsenals. Every think tank became busy preparing blueprints for ploughing the available savings into national development. The blue-ribbon International Commission on Peace and Development, headed by Dr M. S. Swaminathan, also prepared a compendium called Uncommon Opportunities and ceremonially presented it to the Secretary-General of the UN, Mr Boutros Boutros Ghali.

There was indeed a rapid fall in global military expenditure in the decade 1988-98, immediately following the end of the Cold War. But the downward trend has been reversed in the last six years and Defence spending round the world is once again going up alarmingly in scale and magnitude. The increase has been by as much as six per cent annually in real terms, touching $800 billion in 2002. The rate of increase in military spending in 2002 was double that of 2001, and overall was 14 per cent higher than its low point in 1998. Almost three quarters of the rise is attributable to the US, with the Iraq war further exacerbating the situation. This is borne out by a detailed review of military spending contained in the June 2004 issue of the journal Insight published by the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) of the University of Sussex.

The study reveals that China and India, with 18 and 9 per cent increase in military expenditure in 2002 are now in the big league comprising 15 other heavy military spenders of which France, Germany, Japan, the UK and the US occupy the top position.

Another disturbing finding is that many developing countries spend a higher share of their national resources on the military establishment than even the top spenders in the developed world, tragically exceeding the amounts they allocate for health and education combined.

Aggravating this "grotesque irony", as the paper calls it, is the flourishing arms trade for 80 per cent of which the five permanent members of the UN Security Council are to be blamed. Their hard-sell has resulted in poor developing countries buying $20 billion worth of arms in 2003 — money that would have come in handy to fight the war on hunger, malnutrition and preventable diseases.

The alarm sounded by the IDS against the scourge of militarism deserves to be heeded by governments and civil society alike.